Tag Archives : spiraling time

As Nuno Ramos, Brazilian sculptor and author stated, “In Sao Paulo, there is an intense sense of urgency—life wants you, and life asks you to do everything…you are required every minute…you are necessary.” This sense of urgency and immediacy is reflected directly in his work, which embodies the very humanistic quality of the work being dead after its work is done, of being finished at its conclusion. Despite this, there is a tremendous amount of conversational vibration that surrounds the ambiguities in his work, a direct reflection of the ambiguousness of life in Brazil, where social configurations and a colorful history are intertwined like thread.

In her address, Leda Martins asked us to consider the varying aspects of time in Brazilian performance art. Her lecture was different than most I have ever attended in its degree of participation. Leda focused on experience rather than recounting events. She did not just tell us about these great dances, she showed them, had us sing along, and even utilized three different performers throughout her lecture to draw us into the realm as the original viewer and not a listener of a secondhand account.

After Jeffery Skoller introduced Leandro Katz and Paola Santoscoy to the audience, he explained his interest in bridging the gaps between intergenerational perspectives with conversation in conjunction with the artistic themes and approaches that have transformed over time. Paola and Leandro are both interested in photography’s translation of time and place. Each are especially interested in the fantastic and surreal. I really enjoyed hearing each speak about pushing the boundaries of film in order to produce something new.

Encountering the Spiraling Time symposium exposed just how steeped in restrictive ideologies about the linear progression of time I was. My conceptions about how time works have been transformed. I have discovered that time and memory are nuanced and complex, and do not neatly conform to any systematic grid like a calendar. Blurring the lines even further are the political and economic forces invested in the way we remember.

On Friday, as I walked up to the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive to attend the event Spiraling Time, I felt a sense of excitement in the air. People were buzzing with chatter about the first hour and a half of the symposium including some of my classmates who I ran into at the front door. They expressed to me how moving and extremely emotional the first event was, increasing my excitement and anticipation. As a first-time symposium attendee, I was pleasantly surprised by the serenity of the space, the structure of the event, and the participant/audience dynamic.

The Spiraling Time symposium opened on Friday, March 15, 2013 at the Berkeley Art Museum, with the keynote address by Andrea Giunta, Chair of Latin American Art History & Criticism of the department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. One of the world’s leading authorities on modern and contemporary Latin American art, Giunta provided a compelling lecture about the recurring themes in the art of South America – violence, memory, and scars from the past. These themes are perpetuated as counters to the totalitarian regimes that swept a dark cloud of disappearances, torture, and murder across the Southern Hemisphere in the latter twentieth century.

A work consisting of photograph taken through an analytical process that concentrates on the same sight, recording the passing of natural events in their relation to historical ones.
The work is thought as
1) Nature as an analogue of history and against the classical idea of nature as renewal, but of dominated nature: nature as ruins.

In my country, Brazil, the issue of time is an odd one. It’s clear that we live in a sort of perpetual disconnect between the past and the future, in the sense that we assimilate little of what the present has to offer. The present moment seems to commit joyful suicide at every instant.

In my talk, I will analyze how some choreographic-sculptural propositions by Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticia and Lygia Pape, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not only blur the line between action and object, body and image, but also disrupt the “time-zone” of historical narratives about the relations between visual arts and dance. Following Didi-Huberman’s assertion that art history is constantly re-beginning with every new work, I am interested in inflecting his insight with the specificity of Brazil in its particular geo-political context.

The past haunts us. It drives our need to recover archives; to activate fragments of a time lived before (by one or by others) into a new experience. Memory is one of the most recurrent themes in contemporary art. It is considered to be characteristic of Latin American art, but it is not. European cities (particularly Berlin) as well as those of Latin America (especially Buenos Aires) have become huge memorials. Centotaph cities.

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The Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley is a think tank for the arts, a genuinely interdisciplinary space that brings people together--from across the university and beyond the university, from across the arts and beyond the arts--for unexpected conversations, collaborations, and community-building.